Jim Kerstetter in a BusinessWeek commentary – Business Software Needs a Revolution:

"Last year, the National Institute of Standards & Technology estimated that the annual cost of difficult-to-use or flat-out buggy software on the U.S. economy was $59.5 billion. Analysts estimate business-software customers spend $5 installing and fixing their software for every $1 they spend on software.

[…] There's a troubling analogy to be made here to the fall of the American auto industry in the 1970s. As early as the 1950s, quality assurance experts like W. Edwards Deming were trying to win converts to rigid quality standards. Few in Detroit listened. But quality management was embraced in Japan, which helped to make the Japanese auto industry a powerhouse. Today, software quality gurus have been largely ignored in Silicon Valley. But in the new tech center of Bangalore, India, quality experts have been welcomed.

[…] Software should be delivered as a service over the Internet instead of shipped to customers on a disk. If the people who designed the software are the ones actually running it, wouldn't they have an easier time fixing it when something goes wrong?"